December 2009

December 2009

* Paranormal Activity|||||5
Two Lovers (Gray, 2009)|||||8.5

I felt like I was watching a film from the 70s a number of times. Pace and scene styling was superb. Then there's that club scene where we spend a few moments in the beginning watching a random breakdancer, and it felt like a first real revival of that venerable old movie tradition of getting to see a full nightclub act to preface scenes set in nightclubs.

Anyway, a perfectly molded look at adulthood, its predictability, and the errant factors that are romance and Leonard's weird psychology and biology.

And Isabella Rossellini's final shot = fucking killer!

* Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)|||||9

I think I'll still take Death Proof, thick with trauma & tragedy, over Inglourious Basterds, lithe with scrutiny of history and war, but it's neck-and-neck.

The Ghost Ship (Robson, 1943)|||||7

Finely, finely drawn portrait of masculine self-image and the complex network of authority and obedience, empowerment and self-subordination it takes to withhold one's masculine place. Equal to Beau Travail in its evocation of a masculine order, with a wonderful treatment of Captain Stone as not just a crazy man, but a man slowly going crazy from the falsity that is his power over and separation from the social harum-scarum. In this way, this film communicated what There Will Be Blood should have, albeit without TWBB's speciously topical choices of institutional orders... and yet, it still manages to be more politically charged than that film even makes an effort for. But despite it excellence, The Ghost Ship is still a bit very stilted and unconvincing. It's good this film takes place in the specially neutered and cloistered social order of a ship, because I am much more convinced by the representation of men as a bunch of randy bulls instead of the complacent herded cows this film personifies the Marine employed. Mark Robson is capable of great mise en scene, but his camera and visualization of whole scenes is clunky. This film also has some awful transitions that fail to unite the mood and emotions that run through the film. Russell Wade is also kind of wooden. Richard Dix gets increasingly better as the film goes on. The good override the bad, though, and the plot developments that take place on land just goes to show the minute attention the Lewton co. gave to story and real-world logic.

Fool for Love (Altman, 1985)|||||9

A stunner. Every single bit of it, from the magnificent performances to Altman's counterintuitively liberated sense of visual possibility from working with a stage-bound play adaptation, is absolutely enchanting, in that dark and weird way of an Altman film. It never seems acknowledged enough: Altman may be an American studio filmmaker, albeit a "rogue" one, but he is totally into the weird and the arcane, and Fool for Love is one of his weirdest (haven't read Sam Sheperd's play, but now I'll only be able to see it as existential theater of the absurd, even if it isn't). He even out-Lynches Lynch here, making images of small-town America and the West a place of repressed nightmares, with the same sort of prop-world fantasticalness but with Altman's style and sense of nuance and nebulous behavior placing it firmly in a strange but undeniably real world. Altman's flashbacks that continually flux between accurateness and inaccurateness, reality and fantasy (literally at one point) are one of the more genuinely novel things I've seen in a long time.

Avatar (Cameron, 2009)|||||5.5

There's been criticisms that the film is too cliched and derivative, and then defenses citing the aptness in using archetypal story and mythic history to retrofit for both post-Post-colonial times and state-of-the-art visual technology. This works well to characterize the film's odd, unsuccessful attempt to marry classical storytelling (for him, the blockbuster film) and its capably shamanic sway over popular culture with its pioneering cinematic vision, where the presence of a camera seems completely beside the point to the illimitability of the CGI medium. Keeping with the repertoire of the shaman, it practically seems to regard itself as oral history at work, making the film's alternatingly admirable and puerile revisionist social parable seem perfectly at home. But how really can the sweeping parabolic aggrandizements and moral romanticism of a lovingly fervent oral storyteller persevere when the storyteller - the camera - is so impossibly naturalistic?
Of course, this is a problem with any CGI-fest, from a CGI animated film to the camera-inoperable tricks of a Peter Jackson movie, but I guess what makes it so artistically detrimental here is Cameron's not-inelegant but more than a little repetitive, pre-patterned directing. It's either the variation of close-ups that make up an intimate dialogue scene, his admittedly sturdy handling of action sequences, or the overly, breathlessly omnipresent handling of his more fantastic CGI sequences. Between, there is little pauses and variegation. The film has a rushed pace, too invested in its traditional screenwriting to properly justify its overwhelming intentions of aesthetic immersion, as Children of Men does. Despite very impressive 3-D immersion and the incredible textures Cameron captures in order to make Avatar such an eye-popping and sumptuous work (and I do mean it, the shots utilizing the reflection off plexiglass shielding were especially impressive), the film would be more than a little flat. The moments of tragedy and awful destruction were the moments where the film's theoretical intentions of immersion-realism were the most fit to be used (to put it nauseatingly, "Genocidal imperialism = real life") and so were the best, most effective scenes.

To bag on Cameron for not being artsy enough isn't really new. But I am trying to find a more forgiving, novel way of looking at what every detractor pretty much has (and has rightly, IMO) been getting at: Cameron's directing and the film's shopworn screenplay are no where near as interesting or worthwhile as the FX and the visual textures it creates. Instead of just saying that, how about blame the very idea of taking a shopworn tried-and-true screenplay (complete with voice-overs and propulsive, discreditably cosmetic ellipses of time) and then rendering the "simple power" of its story ineffectual by mundane directing the sheer non-virtue of its technological preoccupation. It's downfall is in its groundbreaking virtual verisimilitude... despite that being the best thing about the movie. How does that sound? Pretentiously paradoxical? Eh, I try.
Thus, its visuals should have been more "theatrical" (i.e. wielded more a sense of cinema's artifice). As it is, sure we have the artifice found in its grandiose environment and those shots floating above and aside those seed-jellyfish spirits, but again, that's the camera - aka our, the audience's, surrogate eye and mental palette - being "too powerful to be true," too limitlessly "neutral" to actually be the minds of the audience being story-told - which is why the bits of tragedy are the best parts, because it finally asks us to mourn for the aliens, instead of just gawk at their world. 3-D ashes work much like Schindler's List's red coat - visual gimmickry and a drippy symbolic sentiment, but manipulative storytelling embracing its storytelling emotional pedantry. Avatar's "verite" immersion is hollow. It should've gone all-out formally rigid, Children of Men-style. Or better yet, Barry Lyndon-style. That film would've really gotten 3-D textures to linger. ... Also, it must be said, this movie was waaaay way to long.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock, 1971)|||||6.5

A beautiful and often genuinely unnerving gothic horror film. Really rich filmmaking here. It doesn't amount to much beyond its horror trappings, which it gets too caught up in near the end, and its screenplay is the sort of pretentious that leads it into thinking having a character point at a family relic and say, "That's history," is fleshed out enough when it's a little half-baked... but nonetheless, this film has almost the soul-stirring low-fi schlockiness of Carnival of Souls. But while that film was assured and charged by 60s modern-art gung-ho, this one is a bit logy with 70s bootstrap filmmaking and realism.

Mirrors (Aja, 2008)|||||3

I realized the problem with modern horror movies when I was watching Mirrors and came a scene set in a monastery, and this monastery had all the atmosphere and character of a movie set. I suppose if the movie was making a comment on stultifying moral hygienics and the sterility of Catholic nunnery in modern times, but I just made that up and it is clearly not the case.

Mirrors is pretty lame aside from some sturdy suspense set-ups and good old-fashioned dramatic kitsch, like separated parents coming together through a concerted effort to paint over cursed mirrors. Aja is amping the gore up to 11 as usual, but his story warrants none of it so that its gratuitousness feels extra cheap.

Eggshells (Hooper, 1969)|||||4.5

Although filled with numerous highly intricate set pieces and sequences of abstract artistic brio, its utter plotlessness, rambling puerile hippie dialogue that leads to no discernible arc in any regards, and, as a result of both of those things, the film's nigh incomprehensibility, render this frequently audacious film a merely narratively-challenged, often mindless, at times intolerable piece of avant-garde hogwash.

* Shutter (Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom, 2004)|||||3.5

It tries to tell a provocative story and speak to something or other theoretics about picture-taking... I guess. But Shutter has such a tin ear for so many aspects of good moviemaking and storytelling, it's hard to feel the film has any thoughts in its head at all. It hurts watching ineptitude at times. It has no sense of pacing, build-up, character development, etc. - it's just a string of slick scares that aren't scary. It's like Hollywood didn't even have to remake it because this movie already is exactly like a bad Hollywood supernatural horror flick.

Paranormal Activity (Pell, 2007)|||||5

Oh, well that was better than I expected it to be. It's more written and character-driven than I thought it would be (I knew nothing about the plot going in), and despite being gimmicky, it's not all that gimmicky.

I really liked the way the camera was used - a nosy and troublesome toy being constantly moved around by the insensitive Micah, that soon becomes a 2nd demon to the frazzled Katie. Also, there was something about the staging and framing of the between-bedroom scenes of plot development that suggested there was thought put into where the camera was placed and how it interacted with the characters. Nothing to go crazy about, but Pell doesn't seem like a talentless buffoon behind the camera, as is common with up-and-coming hopeful horror film directors. And he seems to work well with actors, because I thought the performances were excellent and naturalistic.

It's also a slim, nicely paced film, the rigid structure working very strategically to create its effect of a creeping disease and its portrayal of Katie as someone getting increasingly fed up with living in fear. Her protestations when she's outside on the bench - the subtle venom and resentment in her voice - was probably the scariest bit for me.

On the con side, it's a limited film, both stylistically and content-wise, the screenplay nothing to write home about (oh, it's either a GHOST or a DEMON - wow, that's some in-depth demonology right there) and the scares more than a bit labored.